“But why is it green?” is never a phrase you expect to blurt out upon peeking in the oven to check on the progress of your flatbread (a flatbread which, incidentally, did not contain any ingredients of the particularly alarming emerald shade of the finished product).
My experimental baked goods may not turn out as planned, but at least my life has. It would be hard for it not to, seeing as I only had one plan: veterinary medicine (well, two if you count eloping with Kiefer Sutherland and starting a Sheltie farm in Scotland). Be it a defense mechanism against potential disappointment or just single-mindedness, I never make plans for the future. What if I set goals and have aspirations beyond my career? Tonight showed me what awaits the best-laid plans: catastrophic failure of a completely unanticipated and inexplicable nature.
Had I planned on having being in love, God forbid even married, by the age of twenty-five, imagine my would-have-been dismay that, at twenty-three, I have yet to be in a single romantic relationship (and no, those two dates sophomore year of high school don’t count, nor does my passionate love affair with the two kilogram bag of French cocoa powder recently purchased on Amazon). Or if I had foreseen owning my own place? How disappointed I would be to find myself still paying far too much rent and not at liberty to adorn the front lawn with plaster squirrels and gnomes!
Besides the all-consuming goal of getting into, and now surviving, vet school, I have not set a single goal in recent memory. Maybe I’m just so focused on my vocation that I lost sight of everything else. Perhaps I don’t want to put forth the effort to strive for new, exciting, challenging, and frightening things. It could be I just don’t want to have a dream to compare to reality when all is said and done. Had I expected a crisp, nicely browned flatbread for dinner tonight, how much more dismayed would I have been at the sight of the gummy, green, scrambled-egg like sheet that emerged from the oven? Is it better to have no expectations and no results that come up short (no risk, no letdown, but also no reward) or to dream big, try hard, and risk ending up with a disappointing reality? Of course, you could succeed … but that’s about as likely as a spontaneously green loaf of bread.
Update: Rummaging in the kitchen for a glass of water before bed, my eyes alit on the leftovers (aftermath?) of tonight’s ill-fated dinner. Teal. It is now electric teal. Dear God, what have I brought into this world?
chompd 